The New York Times and The Washington Post picked up the story and Nappy Hair became news Herron’s appearances on the Today Show and Good Morning America and many other media outlets followed. The administration of Brooklyn’s PS 75 was called in and the white teacher, Ruth Sherman, was forced to transfer from her position, despite her own avowed good intentions in sharing with the class a celebratory book by a Black-Jewish author. The photocopy appeared to this mother to be akin to racist imagery, and in response the enraged mother asked her daughter’s teacher where she kept her KKK hood. But the tremendously positive valence of “nappy hair” in the picture book was lost in translation, if you will, when a Black mother found a photocopy of an image from Nappy Hair in her third grader’s folder. Nappy Hair (1997) is a brief, tuneful picture book beautifully illustrated by Joe Capeda that celebrates the unruly nature of the main character Brenda’s hair-it has a life of its own, this fantastic hair, and crunches like snow and was so beloved that “God wanted hisself some nappy hair upon the face of the earth.” Brenda runs away from anyone with a comb or chemical processes to straighten or control her revolutionary hair, and the book overwhelmingly revels in it as a source of pride. In addition to children’s books, novels, and academic articles, Herron also wrote the libretto for an opera entitled Let Freedom Sing: The Story of Marian Anderson (2008), which was performed at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington, D.C. Nappy Hair won the Marion Vannett Ridgeway Honor award and Parenting Magazine’s 1997 Reading Magic Award. In 2011, Be’chol Lashon, an organization devoted to raising awareness about the ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity of the Jewish people, granted Herron a lifetime achievement award for her dedication to children’s literature that explores the diversity of Jewish life, especially Black Jews. Much of her work traces patterns of shared trauma and convergence between Blackness and Jewishness, from the late fifteenth-century Jewish expulsions from Spain and Portugal, to the Atlantic slave trade, to the Holocaust and contemporary racism and antisemitism. Raised in the Christian faith but with Jewish ancestry and having been interested in the Hebrew Bible, Jews, and Jewishness ever since she was a child, Herron converted to Judaism and held her Bat Mitzvah at the Harvard Hillel in 1996. Now retired from her academic career, Herron works with Epicentering the National Mall Coalition in Washington, D.C. She has published many other books, but Nappy Hair remains the best known.
Holyoke, California State University, Chico, and William and Mary. in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985 and taught at Harvard, Mt. Carolivia Herron was born on July 22, 1947, to Oscar Smith Herron and Georgia Carol Johnson, and grew up in Washington, D.C.
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